Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Ed Whelan doesn't get it because he refuses to get it

Ed Whelan is a smart guy. However, Whelan can demonstrate unimaginable ignorance, presumably in service to his religion. Today Whelan writes:

2014—By a vote of 5-1, the Maine supreme court, purporting to reconcile two statutes, rules that a public school is required to allow a “transgender girl”—that is, a boy who identifies as a girl—to use a girls’ bathroom.

Whelan cannot cope with the term that is well understood by both the public and medical science: Transgender girl. While boy who identifies as a girl might be technically accurate, Whelan uses it as a term of derogation. Perhaps it suggests something that is optional. Yet, according to the science, the brains of people with gender dysphoria have structural elements that are consistent with the opposite sex.1 Common sense should inform Whelan that no boy ever volunteered to go to school wearing his sister's dress.

As the dissenter argues, the ruling defies “the plain language of a specific statute [that] explicitly requires segregating school bathrooms by sex.” …

That is the stubborn obtuseness of ignoring the concept of gender. When gender and natal sex are incongruent, gender is controlling.

In other words, under the court’s logic, men in Maine may now use any public women’s bathroom, and women in Maine may now use any public men’s bathroom. …

No it does not. It means that the tiny minority of people who are transgender can use bathrooms consistent with their gender. All the fuss over where trans people can pee defies rational explanation. Logic, reason and medical science become subservient to religious belief.

Whelan dismisses the critical thinking as “Liberal judicial activism.” I call it common sense.

We allow faith to be irrational because it is a belief system. We can believe in burning bushes, the parting of the Nile or that we are all descended from Adam and Eve without enduring much criticism.

Mr. Whelan is advocating for public policy that is in accordance with his faith; something that he will probably deny. I don't want laws in conformity with the Church's teachings any more than he wants to be forced to keep kosher.

———1 Research on post mortem brains of male-to-female transsexuals (MtFs) and one female-to-male transsexual (FtM) has demonstrated that one of the sex-dimorphic brain nuclei, the central part of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, shows all characteristics of opposite—sex differentiation.